Social media often first at tragedy scene

Jul. 7, 2013
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David Eun, an executive at Samsung, was a passenger on the ill-fated Asiana Airline 214 that crashed in San Francisco. He tweeted about the crash shortly after getting out of the smoking plane. / twitter.com/@Eunner

by Doug Stanglin and Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

by Doug Stanglin and Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

It is perhaps fitting that the first on-scene report on the Asiana airplane crash came not from a traditional correspondent but via social media in the form of a Samsung executive and one-time online media boss who was also a passenger on the ill-fated plane.

In his first tweet, David Eun, the former president of AOL Media and Studios, calmly laid out the dramatic story for a quickly growing worldwide audience:

He was even cool and collected enough to include a photo of the smoking Boeing 777 and even the handle for San Francisco International Airport (@flySFO), on whose runway he stood.

The tweet quickly ricocheted across the social media landscape, getting retweeted 32,700 times. His 2,000 pre-crash Twitter following soared almost tenfold within hours.

As the Boston Marathon bombings and Texas filibuster have already demonstrated, social media not only gets there first, it can often provide critical information in the first moments of a tragedy.

Last week's ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was in many ways conducted over social media as Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, the army chief of staff, weighed in on his Facebook page, while Morsi's team answered back on the Egyptian president's page -- at least until it was shut down. All the while, pro- and anti-Morsi forces kept their supporters updated on the latest demonstrations and reports of violence.

The social media activity around the San Francisco crash was particularly striking because the traditional media could not immediately reach the site in the middle of a runway.

"Fire and rescue people all over the place," Eun tweeted. "They're evacuating the injured. Haven't felt this way since 9/11. Trying to help people stay calm. Deep breaths‚?¶"

Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at Columbia University and a faculty member at the Graduate School of Journalism, says the response to the crash "is yet another another example of how social media can be very effective in covering a story."

"It's not new ‚?? we've seen this in a dozen other stories over the years ‚?? maybe more," he says. "In this particular case you had just the quality of the information was very high, in part because of all the folks with cellphones right there. You can go in and read about a person's background."

Sreenivasan says social media -- Twitter, YouTube, etc -- are "an essential part of the toolkit" for journalists and the Asiana tragedy underscored how journalists need to be able to use them for reporting as well as source development.

The Hollywood Reporter's Tina Daunt writes that the story's development "was the latest chapter in what has become an emerging story for the traditional news media, which has found itself ever-more reliant on social media bulletins and photos for its most immediate and, often, eye-witness coverage of significant breaking news events."

On Saturday's tragedy, she writes, "the lesson implicit in that story was dramatically reinforced when traditional news outlets with no reporters immediately on the scene were forced to rely on passengers' Twitter postings, as well as dozens of photos posted to the Internet by passengers and those waiting inside the airport terminals."

While reporters rushed to the scene and photographers trained their long lenses toward the tarmac, Eun kept up a running commentary, noting that he didn't want to divert from the crash but was posting updates to "let everyone know that majority of passengers seem ok."

Eunice Bird Rah (@EuniceBirdRah), of Las Vegas, captured the heartrending drama faced by relatives of passengers with her simple tweet: "Pls pray for my dad, he is on the 777"

Then, in a sign of the times, she tweeted to CNN the good news that her father was fine. She reported that he had even texted her a photo, one of the most stunning photos from the early moments of the ordeal, which she included in her tweet.

Columbia University's Sreenivasan says skepticism of social media by traditional journalists is healthy "but it can't get in the way of trying to understand one of the most important new ways in which communication happens in the world."

He says the traditional media seems to discover social media each time it contributes to newsgathering, whether in the 2008 presidential election or Chinese earthquake. "How many times can social media come of age? It comes of age with every major crisis and big story."

There was, perhaps, no better example than on Saturday, when Scott Traylor, who was inside the terminal at the San Francisco airport, captured the first video of the crash and quickly posted it via Twitter and YouTube.

In another sign of the merging of the old and new media worlds, Taylor was not only savvy in getting his video out first, he assured news outlets they could use it, as long as they gave him appropriate credit (@360KID Scott Traylor ).